Expert Tips For Shopify vs. Woo Commerce

Entrepreneurs like you who are preparing to launch eCommerce websites to sell online need to carefully compare eCommerce tools to select the best platform for their unique needs. Would you best benefit by leverage Woo Commerce features, Shopify features, or Magento features?

As a digital marketing agency that has helped several entrepreneurs launch eCommerce websites and compare eCommerce tools, we know a lot about your eCommerce software options. In this blog post, we’ll compare six Woo Commerce features and Shopify features to help you decide between these two popular eCommerce platforms.

• Which eCommerce Software Offers the Best Design Options?

It goes without saying that eCommerce websites need to be well designed, both for desktop and mobile users.

Modern online shoppers quickly bounce off eCommerce websites that feel clunky, are difficult to navigate, or don’t display product images in an aesthetically-appealing and compelling way. Woo Commerce and Shopify approach store design in two different ways.

Woo Commerce is a WordPress plugin, which means in order to use this eCommerce software, you must have a WordPress site. While that’s great for design – there are so many different design options with WordPress – WordPress isn’t an out-of-the-box solution.

You can definitely have a unique, customized eCommerce website if you use Woo Commerce, but you’ll have to either put in the work to create the design yourself, buy a theme from a third party, or hire a designer to design your store for you. However, with branding and user experience being so important to eCommerce websites, many entrepreneurs who want to sell online see these investments as just a basic expense of launching an online store.

Shopify, on the other hand, comes with free and paid design options that the average person can easily customize on their own. There are several beautiful designs to choose from, but you do want to customize things like colors and fonts so that your online store doesn’t look like others.

The good news is, though, that Shopify provides a simple user interface for customizing designs, so it’s an easy do-it-yourself task, which is great if you’re working with a limited budget for launching your online store.

• Which eCommerce Software Offers the Best Pricing?

The pricing differences between Woo Commerce and Shopify aren’t as straight-forward as they may initially appear.

If you want simplicity and a single vendor to pay, then Shopify is for you. With Shopify, you pay $29/month for hosting, receive an SSL certificate for free, and pay an additional $9/year for a premium domain.

The Woo Commerce plugin is technically free, though you’ll pay for a theme if you purchase one from Woo Themes.

Additionally, you’ll have other regular expenses to third parties, including $5-$100/month to a third party for website hosting, $0 to $100/year to a third party for an SSL certificate (depending on what deals you can find), and $9/year to the third party for a premium domain.

• Are Woo Commerce Features Better Than Shopify Features?

Deciding whether Woo Commerce features are better than Shopify features is really a subjective exercise. To make it easier for you, we’ll tell you what we love about each of these eCommerce software solutions.

• Woo Commerce is great because:
  • It gives you complete customization and control over your eCommerce website.
  • WordPress is a huge community, so there’s a seemingly endless amount of themes to choose from.
  • It’s easy to configure Woo Commerce to work with your WordPress website.
• Shopify is great because:
  • It’s an out-of-the-box solution that benefits entrepreneurs who may not be as tech-savvy or have the time to customize their eCommerce websites.
  • With Shopify, you just pay one vendor for everything related to your online store.
  • Shopify allows you to quickly create eCommerce websites.

• Which eCommerce Software Is Easier to Use?

If you’re not tech-savvy, then Shopify will hands-down be easier for you to use than Woo Commerce. As we’ve mentioned above, it truly is an out-of-the-box option for quickly launching eCommerce websites.

While customizations to themes are always recommended, Shopify makes customizing a theme very easy, even for those who aren’t design-inclined.

That being said, so many people know and love WordPress, which makes choosing Woo Commerce a great solution if you want a more unique online store or you want more control over it.

Whether you implement Woo Commerce yourself, or you hire a designer to create your store on WordPress for you, if you want more control over your eCommerce website, Woo Commerce is the clear choice for you to use.

• Which eCommerce Software Offers the Best Customer Support?

Shopify offers free 24/7 support to its users via email, chat, or a phone call. It also has a very built-out online knowledge basis to look for support articles that may apply to you.

Woo Commerce, which is a WordPress plugin, offers support through the WordPress Forums or by going to WooCommerce.com and creating a free account to access its online support.

If you want to make sure you have 24/7 support available at your fingertips in several different formats, Shopify is the clear choice for you.

• Which eCommerce Software Makes it Easier to Incorporate SEO?

The importance of incorporating SEO into eCommerce websites can’t be overstated enough. Your online store needs to include common search terms related to the products you sell so that you rank highly on Google and get discovered via search engine results.

But, SEO isn’t all about the content you create. There’s the back-end to SEO, which includes ensuring that your online store has all the appropriate meta information, a natural linking structure, and clean code.

Shopify is great at this, and as long as you’re smartly incorporating popular keywords into your web content, you should be fine with SEO.

Woo Commerce, is run on one of the largest publishing platforms there is – WordPress. As such, WordPress is full of knowledgeable SEO experts who can help you create optimized content, and has several SEO plugins, like YoastSEO, to fine-tune your SEO even more.

Ranking the two websites in terms of which provides the best SEO experience really is a subjective exercise. But just as with other aspects of the two eCommerce software platforms, if you’re looking for something that requires as little effort as possible to check the SEO box off your to-do list, you likely want Shopify.

So Which Platform Is The Best?

As you can see from the discussion above, there’s strength with both Woo Commerce features and Shopify features.

If you want more customization and control, you’ll likely want to choose Woo Commerce. If you want to get your online store set up quickly and with as little work as possible, Shopify is best for you.

We Can Help Customize eCommerce Websites

Whichever platform you choose, we can help. Whether you need assistance with setting up and customizing Woo Commerce or need help creating content that’s optimized for search engines that will go on a site run by either of these two platforms, we can help. To get started, call us at (877) 682-2012 or fill out our online contact form.

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